Canadian Pacific says reducing rail speeds not the solution

CALGARY - Canadian Pacific Railway is commending the federal government’s decision to order old tank cars off the rails, but CEO Hunter Harrison said new rules relating to speed will do nothing to address the human factor at play in rail accidents.

On Wednesday, Transport Minister Lisa Raitt announced a series of new measures aimed at improving Canadian rail safety. These measures included ordering 5,000 older DOT-111 tanker cars off the rails immediately and implementing a three-year phase-out for tens of thousands more.

The DOT-111s are the tanker car model implicated in the Lac-Megantic explosion, and in recent months Harrison has said repeatedly that they need to be removed from the system.

But while Harrison praised Raitt’s tank car announcement, he took issue with newly announced rules requiring trains carrying dangerous goods to slow to 50 miles per hour or less when passing through populated areas or other routes deemed to be higher-risk.

“While we will comply with all the orders, I must again reiterate that reducing train speeds does not address the causes of railway accidents, nor is it a solution to rail safety,” Harrison said in a statement. “Human behaviours are a significant factor and should be the focus if the goal is to truly improve safety.”

Montreal-based Canadian National Railway, in the aftermath of Lac Megantic, voluntarily introduced a “key train policy” that includes track inspections and speed restrictions for trains carrying dangerous goods.

Spokesperson Mark Hallman said in an e-mail that the company’s policy aligns with Transport Canada’s new regulations.

But CP spokesperson Ed Greenberg said while the Calgary-based railway has its own processes in place to assess risk and reduce train speeds where appropriate, the new regulations exceed them and could cause congestion on rail lines across Canada.

“We are going to be monitoring for unintended consequences from the announcement, such as what slower trains will do for our overall network and the impact it would have on velocity for moving our customer shipments,” Greenberg said, noting the new regulations also come at a time when the government is demanding that railways move grain faster to cope with last fall’s record harvest.

Instead of lowering speed limits, Greenberg said there are other things the government could do to advance rail safety in Canada — including instituting a program to reduce grade crossings to decrease the incidence of crossing accidents, or supporting the use of inward-facing cameras in locomotives to allow for compliance monitoring of conductors and engineers.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said Thursday it is “broadly supportive” of the new federal regulations, adding the government appears to have struck a balance between the need to mitigate risk and the need to move crude.

“We don’t expect, based on what we know today, that there will be significant overall impact on the ability to grow rail movements of crude oil as we project them to evolve over the next three or four years,” said Dave Collyer, CAPP president and CEO.

However, Collyer added producers will have to work closely with service providers and rail car manufacturers if they’re going to phase out the old DOT-111 cars within three years, a time frame Collyer called “ambitious.”

The DOT-111 is the workhorse of the rail industry, and there are approximately 72,000 older model cars currently in service hauling flammable liquids in North America. Experts put the cost of retrofitting tank cars at between $20,000 and $70,000 each.

Though railways often bear the brunt of bad publicity in an accident, for the most part, they don’t own the cars they transport and under law cannot refuse to haul them as long as they meet federal safety standards. In addition to calling on the government to ban the old DOT-111s, both CN and CP recently instituted a safety surcharge on customers who use that model.

The Railway Supply Institute, whose members build more than 95 per cent and own or lease over 70 per cent of tank cars operating in North America, issued a statement Wednesday saying it has invested more than $7 billion since 2011 of putting 55,000 new, stronger tank cars into service by 2015.

A spokesperson for the Railway Supply Institute declined to comment on whether the three-year phase-out time frame is feasible, saying only that the organization needs to review the full details of Transport Canada’s regulations.

astephenson@calgaryherald.com

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